At 9:00 am on Tuesday July 23rd at Lafayette Middle School, State Superintendent of Education, John White, begins a series of public meetings about ESSA – the Every Student Succeeds Act. The public, including parents, teachers and community members are required to be involved to help build the state’s ESSA compliance plan. This provides the public the opportunity to change the state accountability system, one that is currently almost exclusively driven by standardized test scores.

As corporate-supported K-12 education reformers promote school choice, the concept of ‘single applications’ for all schools within a city or district – traditional, charter, for-profit, voucher, on-line, etc. – is also being promoted. The New Orleans ‘One App’ single application system is looked upon as a model, despite significant parent criticism. Boston, MA, and Oakland, CA, are planning to create single-enrollment systems for all traditional public schools and charter schools. These districts might heed warnings

Research on learning with paper texts versus computers shows unique strengths for paper. Comparisons of PARCC scores echo those findings. Scores of students taking PARCC tests on paper were consistently higher than for matched groups of students taking the tests on computers. READ about PARCC score comparisons here: PARCC Scores Lower on Computer Exam. READ about research on reading here: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. Are school systems

There’s been a lot of criticism of John White, the Louisiana Department of Education, and the sitting BESE board for withholding data and data manipulation. Educational researchers and policy advocates are particularly incensed when the LDOE refuses to release data that had been traditionally used to double-check the claims of the state. The Advocate has posted a story about the rising controversy over White refusing to release PARCC test scores. (PARCC is the standardized achievement test that

The education priorities One Acadiana announced at a PR event at ULL’s Picard Center are a mixed bag. Sure it’s great to support increased funding of pre-K classrooms at the Picard Center for Childhood Development. But the confident announcement of success for Louisiana’s corporate-driven reforms is both disturbingly self-congratulatory and dangerously wrong. The absences and odd choices in the presentation should serve as a warning signal to concerned citizens—absent is any mention of Louisiana’s basically unchanged

PPEL (Power of Public Education Lafayette) held a public forum on the Louisiana School Performance Score on September 15 at 6:00 pm in the Clifton Chenier Community Center in North Lafayette. The free forum focused on how the Louisiana School Performance Scores, School Letter Grades, and standardized testing effect our children. It provided up-to-date information from people with different positions within the world of public education. Questions were taken from the audience and folks stayed after the event

Stories in the Independent and the Advertiser broke the news that Greg Davis, with Gary McGoffin acting as lawyer, have threatened a lawsuit against the board unless they comply with demands to pass as set of resolution that end the investigation of Superintendent Cooper and that the board accept last years budget going forward rather than finish putting together its own budget. The Advertiser in particular has a very interesting and informative set of comments